


The Returners

by HandmaidenOfHorror



Category: Original Work
Genre: Brexit, Gen, Immigration & Emigration, Neuropa, POV Second Person, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 13:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21320587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HandmaidenOfHorror/pseuds/HandmaidenOfHorror
Summary: A stream of consciousness second person narrative relying the feelings and experiences of a person who emigrated from Eastern Europe into the United Kingdom, only to be forced to return due to Brexit.
Kudos: 1





	The Returners

You are a worker. Everybody in your family has been a worker, all employed in a large plant. The glory of socialism! Your life was simple yet certain. You knew where you will work.

And then, bam, democracy, all that shit, the changes, and among them, the factory is closed. And just like that, most of the town finds themselves unemployed. Government doesn’t do a shit to help people.

And you think, was it really worth it?

You were young. You only just started working there. It sucks hard, but you have time. Others don’t. People turn to alcohol to forget and die slowly. Some are not patient enough to let alcohol kill them.

You persist for over a decade. You marry, not because you see any particular future for yourself, but because it is deemed necessary by society to marry at certain age. You live with your spouse and your parents and a grandparent or two in a flat that has more people than rooms. When a tenant dies, a new one can be born. Such is the circle of life.

And then, bam, Britain opens its border, people rush over. You barely know any English, but you know how to work with your body. Many others who go don’t even have that. You leave your parents and spouse and baby and maybe the remaining grandparent and go into unknown.

Your life in the promised land is shit in ways completely different from your previous life. You share a rented flat with strangers, not all from your country. You work physically until you cannot work any longer. You have nobody to talk to, nowhere to go, no entertainment. However, you have something you have never had before: money. You send most of it to your family at home (funny what you think of as home). After all, you don’t really have anything to spend it on here.

Step by step, your situation is improving. You learn English and thus you can apply for better paid and less tiresome jobs. You keep some money, and improve your living condition – you can rent a room all for yourself, than a flat all for yourself, then buy an used car. Meanwhile, your spouse has been learning English. You invite them, and you are living together, working hard, but it is worth it.

Is it, though? Your child is still living with aging grandparents (their great grandparent has since died). You see them for one weekend every three months. You don’t think you know them at all. You have another child, born in UK. The child’s first language is English, and it speaks your native language poorly. The two siblings are strangers to each other.

Life goes on, and you pretend not to be seeing the dark clouds.

And then, bam, turns out that Brits are not that happy about solidarity after all! Why be part of Europe when you used to be an empire? And suddenly, you are no longer wanted. You have to pack and return. The dark clouds of Brits not wanting to associate with you (all your friends in the UK are fellow immigrants, home country meaningless in their situation) turn into verbal harassment turn into outright violence.

And you think, was it fucking worth it?

All the years of suffering and working until you break. For a better future for your family. The family nobody else gives a shit about. And what do you get? Being thrown away like a machine – sure, it’s still working, but it’s no longer pretty and fancy! You realize you were always just another washing machine. In your country, in new country (that you started to think of as *your* country recently).

You have no option but to return. Return to the country that never cared about you, and since you left turned from a piss poor very conservative village at the end of the world into a somewhat wealthier, but now aggressively regressive village at the end of the world where witch hunts are constantly ongoing. Your family urges you to hide your religion. Your spouse’s family urges them to hide their ethnicity (pogroms are back in town). You tell your younger child to hide their queerness.

And the children, oh god, the children. The older one is an adult now and a stranger. You left when they were a baby, your spouse left when they were in a kindergarden. Your parents were their true parents. You have nothing to talk about. You suspect the abandonment was more traumatic to them than they show you. You now don’t think it was worth it.

The younger one is a Brit. They were born in UK and spent all their life there. There’s nothing of your homeland in them. They never liked the holiday visits, considering your homeland a shithole, and now they are forced to live in it 24/7. They are forced back into a closet they were never really in, about their queerness, their religion, their ethnicity. Living in much poorer conditions, spending up to twelve hours a day in a school where classes are three times the size of British ones, where much of education is nationalistic propaganda.

Your family in not the only ones. Millions are returning. To a country that was never able to feed them all. To a country many of them never lived in to begin with. To a country currently into a freefall to a fascist black hole. You are angry. Your spouse is angry. Your younger child is angry. Your older child is angry. People who never left are angry, seeing as suddenly there’s an inflow of work competition.

The anger will eventually explode. The question is, what will be destroyed in it?

**Author's Note:**

> 21st century emigration from Eastern and Central Europe (Neuropa) into the UK has been enormous. In 2015, Poles were the biggest foreign-born population in the UK, Romanians sixth, Lithuanians fourteenth. The emigration came at great personal cost to the emigrants, often breaking their families (EU orphans) and leading to livelong trauma. And even for those who avoided the initial pitfall, the forced post-Brexit return to the country they've spent a decade or more away from will lead to more trauma - particularly for children who left very young or were born in the UK. As for the home countries, their economies are unlikely to survive sudden influx of millions of new citizens. The situation is unstable.


End file.
